


Antianeirai

by Noccalula, unourssongeur



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms, The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: A Feminist perspective in the zombie apocalypse, Disabled Characters, Dystopia, F/F, F/M, Female Character of Color, Female Friendships, Female Relationships, Female-Centric, Gen, Inspired by The Walking Dead, LGBTQ Female Character of Color, LGBTQ Themes, Multi, Muslim Character, Non-binary youth, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Original Fiction, Other, Set in The Walking Dead Universe, Some smut but not the focal point, Survival, Survival Horror, Women Running Shit, Zombie Apocalypse, buckle in, mama we all go to hell
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-08-28 23:13:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8466631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noccalula/pseuds/Noccalula, https://archiveofourown.org/users/unourssongeur/pseuds/unourssongeur
Summary: The women's camp had a reputation that proceeded them – another dual-edged sword. To the best of their knowledge the exact location of their headquarters was relatively well concealed: the farm was off the grid, any of the locals who might have immediately thought to flock there were long gone by the time Mama had lead the others there almost two years ago, and thus far no one had rolled right up to the gates with bad intentions.  Nonetheless, safety was no longer anything but an illusion – Mama had spent most of her life pre-walking corpses feeling that way anyway – and there was no such thing as a perfect place to hide. The next best thing was a safer place to hide. A group of six women had turned into a group of 47 – women, children, and the lesser-numbered men.  They didn’t keep track on public record, but Mama knew she personally had killed 42 men, 2 women and a child. She didn’t bother keeping count of the walkers. What happens when women refuse to be led by white, straight men in the aftermath of the undead apocalypse? You submit, or you die.





	1. It's Hard To Wish For Wasps

**Author's Note:**

>   
>   
>  One of my most ambitious AO3 projects yet, this story came from a long discussion several years ago with my now-wife regarding the treatment of women in apocalypse movies and media. I'm a long time Walking Dead lover (as is she) and we both love Rick Grimes, but of course, the idea that nothing but (mostly white) heterosexual men would become leaders if the shit hit the fan raised some serious questions. Throughout media, we see what happens to women when the shit hits the fan - they become currency or they become cattle, at the very least passive partners to their male counterparts' more proactive approach and at the very worst, trafficked or sexually assaulted. 
> 
> (As an aside: this is not a story that will ignore sexual assault as a reality for women in this situation. I fully understand the perspective of not wanting to bother reading that - reality is hard enough - but as a writer, I don't intend to ignore its presence, either. That having been said, let me be abundantly clear: there will be /no/ rape scenes in Antianeirai. Ever. We may make allusions to past assaults, we may have characters discuss the topic in the story, but we will never "show" you a scene. Please don't worry about that because it's not going to happen here.)
> 
> So out of that discussion came the question... what would it look like if a group of women decided to form their own survivor group? How would it be run? How would they survive in a scenario that allowed violent, aggressive men to thrive? 
> 
> The fruit of our labors - myself, my wife Cynthia's and Shaun (unourssongeur), our dearest friend who read Night Vale passages at our wedding - is this story, which hopefully you'll enjoy. I know original fiction doesn't get excellent traction much of anywhere, but I'm fine with a small audience as long as they're enjoying themselves (and I have plenty of Marvel fanfiction to keep me warm otherwise). 
> 
> I look forward to your thoughts, and as always, you can reach me on Tumblr at noccalula-writes in the meantime.

 

 

 

_Approximately  
August 11 th_

_People have told me that it never ceases to amaze them that I am still able to put pen to paper. That I physically can, sure. That I’m still alive to do so, that I still have the actual ability to hold one, but that I still want to as well. I was never one of those people who wished for Armageddon to happen, who hoped something bad would happen so I could stand up and “prove” myself. I liked the internet, I liked my car, I liked being able to get up at four in the morning and being able to find instant delicious food (even if it wasn’t necessarily good for me). Sure, I wanted things to change, but for the better- better technology, better rights._

_So, yeah, I didn’t want Armageddon, but I fantasized about the distant future all the time, about how people would look at this time period hundreds of years from now, about who would be remembered. I wanted to be remembered. Not for being the first Iraqi-American female president or discovering the cure for cancer or anything big like that. Wanting to be remembered at all takes a certain amount of ego, but I didn’t want to be remembered for what I did. I just wanted to be remembered for being alive._

_I’ve been a chronic chronicler all my life. Ever since I was a child, I HAD to write. Before the world became what it is now, I had three cardboard boxes filled with my journals and notebooks. I had fantasies when I was a kid where hundreds and hundreds of years in the future, an archeologist would be digging through the remnants of what was my home and stumble across my cache of notebooks. How it would be a huge archeological find that would be written about in journals. Not official documents, but real personal accounts about this person’s life. I would wonder how long it would take them to decipher my words and never thought that they would be disappointed when all they uncovered was an inventory of my stuffed animals. No, they would just be happy for the glimpse into the life of this otherwise unknowable girl. I was here. I was alive._

_All because I couldn’t stop writing._

_But then the internet and social media happened. Why dig for clues when you can just type the year in the search engine and pull up everything from elections to photos of what people were eating?  I grew up and even as my own aspirations grew bigger, buried deep inside was that little girl who wanted to be remembered. It seemed like a sure thing that we ALL would be remembered. I hate now how that fact disappointed me._

_Writing was the only thing that got me through The Great Collapse. (Sure, it was a zombie apocalypse, but the history books are going to need a serious name for what happen. Otherwise, The Great Depression could be called “Dude, Where’s Our Money?”) Writing down everything that happened, no matter how bad it started getting, especially when technology started going down. I thought, “When they get things back up and running, they’re gonna want to know what happened. How we coped.”_

_It doesn’t look like that day is gonna happen. At least not for a long time._

_That’s when I started collecting. When society wasn’t coming back the way any of us thought it would, I knew I had to. I couldn’t just write about me, this isn’t just my story. My experiences were just a blink in the eye time. I had to write everyone’s story- how they coped, how they survived. I tried my best to keep track of the days, to write the cycles of the moon, and track animal migrations- anything that could be of note. I wrote the names of people I came across and wrote the parts of their story they were willing to share. I collected a patchwork history on how parts of the country survived during the initial collapse. I was gathering knowledge. I was building history._

_Mama was a little impressed when she found me and my collection. A lot of survivors I’ve come across thought what I was doing was a waste of time. I can’t really blame them; I’ve done a lot of stupid things to keep all these notebooks with me. But Mama didn’t give me that same judgement. I can’t imagine the look on my face when Mama asked me to keep doing it._

_“History has been shittin’ all over us for too long. We need our story heard. We need to be the ones writing it.”_

_That’s why even when the days are bleak, I write. When our losses make everything seem pointless, I write. When the people around us become more of a threat than the walkers, I goddamn write. I don’t think I ever really had a choice in the matter. Not really, because Mama’s right. These are our stories._

_We need to tell them._

_We were here. We were alive._

_-Amira_

 

~~~

 

“Fuckin’ tobacco worms.”

Mama flicked the browning, masticated leaf in irritation, crouching before one of a long line of tomato plants that had been doing surprisingly well throughout the summer. They had been growing bright green leaves, swollen bulbs of green tomatoes turning orange in the sun, halfway to being ready for harvest until the blight of horned green caterpillars had descended seemingly overnight. Now, every plant in the row had brown spots where the leaves were being eaten away and some of the premature tomatoes were half devoured and quickly rotting. The culprits hung about casually, their thick, pale green bodies inching along the stalks without a care in the world.

Delta came to a crouch beside her, thin legs bowed out to knobby knees that were covered in scars and a fine smattering of blonde hair, her halo of frizzy curls puffed up around her head.

“Them’s like Catawba worms?” she half-asked, half-observed as she reached out to flick one off the plant, “Ain’t nothin’ we couldn’t fish with. Leave ‘em alone long enough, the wasps’ll get ‘em.”

“They’re gonna get our tomatoes before the wasps show up,” Lila lamented, squinting in the midday sun as she stood over the two, hands on her narrow hips, “I could get the kids to bring a bucket out and collect ‘em if they’re not dangerous, use ‘em to fish.”

Mama considered this point, turning to squint up at the lean figure of Lila and then over at Delta, who was stabbing into a squirming worm with her knife. Fucking Delta.

“If Delta says we can fish with them, we fish with them,” Mama conceded with a nod to the aforementioned, who stood up and wiped her knife off on her jeans, “We just need to spray some of that stuff out here that we used near the cabbage.”

Delta and Lila both nodded. While Mama may have been seated firmly as the leader, this is what made the trifecta of them the most effective - Mama made the big calls with objectivity, Lila was an incurable humanist who refused to abandon optimism in the time of the risen dead, and Delta was practical to her bones, not to mention the most capable survivalist she’d met since the shit had hit the fan.

Growing up in the deep south, isolated away from an education or a more modern world, Delta had spent her days in the national forest her family’s land rested on. What she lacked in polish or grammar she more than made up for in knowledge about how to live off the land and survive with nearly nothing; the fact that she had made it all the way to Tennessee from South Alabama by the time Mama met her – a very fateful meeting that was still legend around the campfire – spoke for itself. It had been Delta’s suggestion to mix some of the chili powder they found in abandoned, nearly ransacked grocery stores with dish soap from the same and spray it down to keep the rabbits and the bugs from getting to the vegetables. It had been Delta’s snare traps and ammo rationale that kept them with a small but steady supply of meat through the winters. Delta, along with a former Army soldier, had made distillers for the creek water they lived off. Mama had seen Delta kill rabbits, snakes, walkers and living humans with the same impunity – she was invaluable.

Sometimes Delta disappeared for days, but no one who had been at the camp long was ever worried for _her_ safety.

Mama stood up with a long stretch that popped both her shoulders, brown arms reaching up for the sun until she dropped them back and twisted at the waist, trying casually to pop her back. She so rarely left the camp on her own, usually only to lead expeditions and raids on abandoned stores or houses, her watchful eye especially adept at catching the little things that might have been mistaken for useless and left behind. According to the historian, it was almost five years now of long summers, hard winters and constant terror as she and eventually her group made their way up the east coast. By the historian’s best estimate from the only map they had – that she was working rapidly to duplicate by hand – and Delta’s best guess based on what plants were growing wild, they were somewhere to the east of Manassas, Virginia, maybe halfway to the coast itself.

The undercut she had been sporting when the world went to hell had grown out unevenly until Mama had chopped all of her thick black hair messily short. Even so, it was beginning to hang in her eyes again, heavy with sweat from the midday heat. Making a mental note to get another buzzcut as soon as they could locate a 10 clip for the buzzer, she cut her attention over to Lila.

“Think we can bump up fishing to today or tomorrow, then? I know the fish pond is getting low but we can still keep it stocked until the rain comes again.”

Lila considered for a moment, chewing on her dry lower lip as she watched the two halves of Delta’s split tobacco worm wriggle uselessly in the dirt, “Yeah, I mean… if we’ve got rain coming, Weather Witch?”

“Yep,” Delta confirmed, standing up to finally join the conversation, her bare feet dirty in the soil.

“If you say so,” Lila glanced off at the cloudless horizon before turning her attention back to the leader, “I’ll get the kids ready to hit the creek, then.”

“Perfect. I might come with, need to cool down.”

“Y’aw go on,” Delta clapped a hand against both of their shoulders before walking between them, already off on her own plan of battle that no one was the wiser to, “I’ll hang ‘round.”

Sensing some unease on her companion’s part, Mama turned to raise her eyebrow at Lila with a small smile and a quip about Delta’s mysterious errands on her lips but it died off when she saw that the other woman was still facing the horizon. Lila kept her own hair longer now, grown out from the original short cut but kept up in a tight bun to keep it from being easily grabbed, the knot slightly streaked with silver in an otherwise unanimously brown sea. Her lips seemed perpetually dry these days and her dark eyes were always seeking something on the periphery, looking for some unknown thing or person unbeknownst to everyone but her. Mama could usually see Lila’s rough patches coming – it was when she was most distracted, most uneasy that the darkness they all worked constantly to stave off would creep in. Ebb and flow, sunrise and sunset, it would come and go for her the way it surely did for everyone else, but there were few whose sadness affected Mama the way Lila’s did.

Placing a hand gently at her lower back, Mama pulled Lila from her reverie, “Hey.”

Lila jumped, wide eyes startled until they settled back on Mama in confusion and then exasperation as she sighed and rubbed a hand over her hair, “Shit, sorry.”

“Nah,” Mama dismissed – she wasn’t going to waste anyone’s times with platitudes or digging or useless consolation, opting only to lace her well-muscled arm in Lila’s, “If Delta says rain’s coming, then rain’s coming. We just gotta keep the goddamn tomatoes alive until it does.”

“Wasps,” Lila sighed, rubbing her neck with her free hand as she let the other woman lead her back to the mill house, “It’s hard to want wasps.”

 

~~~

 

The original 5 – Mama – then Lydia, before she had fallen into her newest nickname. Ashleigh and Gina, the sisters in DC that started it all. Miss Daisy - _shima’sani_. Chantelle. And then Lila made 6.

Mama began calling them the Antianeirai – the Amazons, according to Odysseus – and the name stuck.

 

~~~

 

The farmhouse stretched several acres across the high grass, unmown since the dead first began rising and the nice family who ran the entire operation all killed themselves quietly in the living room – the subsequent fire was probably from looters or another group that had holed up inside. On the far east side, it was bordered by a river and a water millhouse; to the far west, north and south were dense forests, providing excellent cover for walkers and marauders alike. This was the dual-edged sword of setting up camp on farm grounds – it often provided extra structure and barriers against the dead but made a group of survivors sitting ducks for any humans looking for people to rob.

The Amazons and their camp had a reputation that proceeded them – another dual-edged sword. To the best of their knowledge the exact location of their headquarters was relatively well concealed: the farm was off the grid, any of the locals who might have immediately thought to flock there were long gone by the time Mama had lead the others there almost two years ago, and thus far no one had rolled right up to the gates with bad intentions.  Nonetheless, safety was no longer anything but an illusion – Mama had spent most of her life pre-walking corpses feeling that way anyway – and there was no such thing as a perfect place to hide. The next best thing was a saf _er_ place to hide.

When they had arrived, it was nothing more than a half-burnt house, an empty barn and a dilapidating water millhouse on land with chest-high broom straw that could have concealed any number of threats. Now, nearly two years later, it had been shorn down into workable gardens and crops, a fenced off area for the livestock (three horses, six pigs and piglets on the way, and chickens), living quarters all over the barn and yard and the headquarters inside of the salvageable portion of the house. Latrines had been dug, a graveyard had been established for the inevitable, ever-growing fallen, and guard posts with armed, trained guards patrolled the grounds. The increasingly feral dogs that were once beloved pets on the farmstead were re-acclimating to people, remembering what it meant to be pet or play ball. The barn cats and their ever-multiplying ranks kept vermin out of the hay.

Mama had so little knowledge of farms before all of this that it had marveled her to see the degree to which it truly was a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Gardens attracted rabbits, about which Delta was extremely knowledgeable, and before long she was setting traps both to kill for food and capture for breeding. Food and clean water were the biggest concern aside from evading murder – how many had survived the initial onslaught only to die of starvation or dehydration? – and with the ranks slowly growing as the scouting trips found women in need of shelter they didn’t have to pay for with their bodies, children who had been caring for themselves for far too long, or the rare few men who voluntarily submitted to the rules of the group or proved themselves useful over time, they quickly became the top priorities.

A group of six women had turned into a group of 47 – women, children, and the lesser-numbered men.

They didn’t keep track on public record, but Mama knew she personally had killed 42 men, 2 women and a child. She didn’t bother keeping count of the walkers.

 

~~~

 

No sooner had Mama sunk happily down into the cool water of the river than Sam had come tearing out of the woods, hauling through the group of children as they baited their hooks and only slowing once their sneakers sunk into the bank.

“Mama!” Sam hollered at the bubbles coming up from the dark water, exasperated with how useless that gesture was by the time they had completed it, “MAMA!”

“Hey now!” Lila cautioned as she cast a glance back at the path, making sure nothing had been hot on the youth’s heels, “Sammy, what’s wrong? What do you need?”

Sam turned around to face Lila, their big dark eyes lit with adrenaline and fear and sweat beading across the tan skin of their forehead. They were freshly seventeen – or around, about – and had finally aged out of the “kids” group, graduating into duties like armed watch or scouting hardly a week before. They were still in that awkward, in-between age of nothing but sharp angles, lean limbs and graceless movements, their cheekbones especially prominent through the hardships that had eaten off whatever baby fat Sam had left years before. Lila noted that Sam, like everyone, seemed to be in the shaggy in-between haircut phase and made a mental note to find the scissors.

“Mama,” Sam repeated and pointed a slender finger at the water, “Delta needs Mama, there’s men in the woods!”

“What?” asked Petal, twelve years old and still excessively fearful after what she had seen a group of bandits do to her parents.

Lila smelled the fear spike and raised a hand to caution Petal down, “Calm down, if Delta’s got a bead on them they’re not a threat.”

“That’s why she wants Mama,” Sam cried and it was punctuated by the woman in question breaking the surface and sucking in an inhale.

Blinking away the water from her long lashes, Mama turned to face the shore and frowned, “Sam?”

“Delta found some men and she needs you right aw-“

Before they could even finish the sentence, Mama came crashing out of the water, her spine lit with adrenaline that she had only just seconds before rid herself of for a blessed, quiet moment. If Delta had found strange men she had either cornered them at gunpoint or was watching them quietly like a hawk. The fact that there were no echoing gunshots meant nothing fateful had occurred yet, and time was of the essence. Time was _always_ of the essence now.

Mama wrung the dirty tank top in her hands as she climbed out of the water, making a quick grab for her shorts and boots. Half the motivation for the dive was to relax and cool off, the other was a lazy way to wash her shirt and underwear. Her standard uniform in the summer was a men’s tank top from a pack she’d swiped from a quick mart, cut offs or jeans, and boots; clothing was not as scarce as food but one could hardly afford to be picky nowadays. She had always been skinny and just shy of tall; hard living had burned away a lot of her curve and left her with lean, cut muscles and a myriad of scars. Bras were an afterthought for most women now regardless of the size of their breasts. Frankly, the lack of societal expectations of wearing one had been one of the only less-awful parts of all this.

Sam was already leading the way back up the path and into the forest, their boots loud against the underbrush. Careless. Scared. But that’s how they always started out, Mama reminded herself, and it wouldn’t be long until the duties put on them would turn Sam into another force to be reckoned with, quiet and quick in the forest.

The frantic male voice ahead told her everything she needed to know. Mama reached out to snag Sam’s arm, making them slow to a stop to walk behind her, as she pulled her pistol from her shorts pocket and approached.

Two men kneeled in the moss with their hands behind their heads, a third laying on the ground holding a bleeding wound. They all looked haggard, tired and ugly with hunger and maybe malice. Their t-shirts were dirty – especially the bleeding one – and they all watched Mama warily as she drew on them and came to stand beside Delta. Small, unassuming Delta with her gun drawn in perfect formation and her breath perfectly even, face perfectly calm and blank.

“What’s this?” Mama asked menacingly.

“Dunno,” Delta responded, not taking her eyes off the two on their knees, “Reckon somebody got too curious.”

“Please,” exhaled the man on the right – white, maybe in his 30’s, on the thin side, virtually the same as all others at this point, “We’re just lost."

_Please_. The first word they always said. _Lost_ , usually the third behind _hungry_.

The man on the ground coughed hard and Sam pulled their gun, keeping it trained on him as he glowered back up at the kid.

“’Lost’ suggests you’re looking for something,” Mama took her gun off the mouthpiece’s head, coming to crouch in front of him, her defiant eyes on his, “What exactly are you looking for there, buddy?”

A twinge of a smile pulled at Delta’s lips but didn’t bloom. Mama’s reputation far exceeded her, maybe even bigger than the Amazons themselves. The ability to keep her people alive rested on Mama’s intimidation and clout, the rumor that she’d cut a man’s head off with a machete and used it to kill his companions when he tried to overthrow the camp (confirmed, and it was one of the best nights of her life) or the whisper that she kept severed penises on a rope (false, though she’d had fun with that one – who in the hell made this shit up? Who in their right mind would actually _believe_ that?).

“We were lookin’ for shelter,” he nearly spat, blue eyes coldly narrowed at Mama’s.

It didn’t take a scholar to see through that look. He hated her. He hated this woman – these two women, maybe Sam too – for having power over him. He hated having to answer questions to keep himself alive. That malice, that blatant misogyny had really only gotten worse in the time since civilization went back to the dogs; any presuppositions that the apocalypse would be a grand equalizer gravely ignored just how engrained social roles were in the minds of human beings. Specifically, in the minds of men.

“You were looking for a camp,” Mama replied coolly, staring down her nose at him and peering through the cloud of his rage rapidly building, “You heard we were here.”

“No,” the other man nearly cried out, hardly as well composed in the circumstances as his partner, “N-no, we weren’t l-look-”

“Shut up,” Mama ordered calmly but concisely, and he stopped rambling.

Sam’s hand shook, but they forced themselves to move both hands to the grip and hold it steady. They may have been frightened, but Sam was well aware of the significance of this moment and all that it would mean when it was over. Over.

This wouldn’t be the first time Sam had to pull a trigger on something still alive.

As he stared into Mama’s dark eyes, the blue-eyed man’s resolve in his ruse waivered. Maybe it was the military level pistols, clearly taken off of soldiers or law enforcement. Maybe it was the equally as valuable silencer on the muzzle of the blonde’s. Perhaps it was how unflinchingly this woman – the ringleader, clearly – stared him right in the face without averting her eyes once. Maybe it was the reputation that had traveled miles away from her. Whatever the case, he opted to try a different approach.

“We were sent to find you, our boss wants to have a word with you.”

Delta’s countenance remained unchanged but Mama’s eyebrows went up in slight surprise, amusement on her thick lips.

“Oh yeah? What word is that?”

He glared back at her with something nearing a smirk, “’Assimilation.’”

The cool, distant threat of Mama’s face dropped its veil in an instant and in its place was a blank, cold stare. A mere second, maybe two passed before she suddenly shoved forward into him, shoulder to his chin. The man’s smirk vanished, blue eyes widening as he coughed and sputtered, looking down to see the hilt of a hunting knife he hadn’t even noticed Mama was holding jammed in his gut, right into the arch of his ribcage. His partner gasped, sucking in a breath that would have surely been a scream if not for the clean scratch of Delta’s silencer. The concise, hollow sound echoed through the forest with nary an eighth the force of an actual gunshot, a squeak of metal that put him down in an instant.

The ringleader stumbled back onto his ass, staring down unblinking when Mama reached down to yank her knife free. A guttural sound lurched up from his throat as hot, dark blood gurgled out through the wound like a small, dark brook rising out of the earth.

Sam turned away when Delta shot the other bleeder, who by this point was still and pale anyway. They wretched only a little, trying their best to be as hard as the women who kept their home safe but feeling that pull of fear deep within their heart that they may never get there. Was that a tragedy, that they were unable to bend their compassion to nothingness in the name of survival, or was it a victory in the face of the world they now lived in?

The man in the middle faltered, clearly still shocked up until he fell into the grass to squirm ineffectually, a dying animal in the forest.

Mama stepped toward him to stare down, watching the surprise in his blue eyes rapidly dull. She was a big believer in the idea that, if you determined someone deserved to die, you had damn well better be ready to pull the trigger yourself.

She raised her gun and slipped her slender finger around the trigger, “Motherfucker.”

He wheezed out in protest. Then, for a long few moments, nothing happened.

“Aren’t you gonna shoot him?” Sam asked, their voice shaky and raw.

Mama watched him shake, blood running from the corner of his mouth.

“Nah,” she said finally, tucking her gun back into the waistband of her shorts and picking up her knife again as she advanced on him, “Better not waste the bullet.”

Delta smiled, a crooked river with jagged rocks.

 

***

 

The gunshot had been the herald of the end of fishing. It had been an uphill struggle and Lila had never been fond of playing Sisyphus, though she showed the patience of someone who believed that boulder would truly crest the hill one day.

It was just one shot, so she wasn’t afraid, but Petal had twined around her, and even the older children were looking at her for a sign that things were okay. Or that they weren’t. She knew very few of her charges were optimists. They knew what a gunshot meant, and were bracing for more.

“Let’s pack up, guys. I think we’ve gotten a good haul for today, and we’ll need to clean and preserve before the sun sets fully.”

Instantly, the kids were grateful to be thrown back into familiarity. They moved with practiced focus, devoting every tense muscle to not losing a single fish of their catch, meager enough despite Lila’s praise. She moved among them, solid and calm. She was a gentle urge to motion, and a maternal comfort.

This was a truth that had been universally held since Lila joined Mama’s troupe. The other might have the nickname, but Lila was the mother-figure to the children.

She was the banisher of bad dreams and the keeper of secrets. Even the most frightened children, like Petal, always came round with regards to Lila. It had been many months since her bed had been just her own, the orphans coming to lay claim to the space around her when they had nightmares. They usually had nightmares, and Lila always made room.

“How do you sleep with all them on you like that?” Mama had asked when it started happening, “I know you’re not comfortable.”

“Have you ever tried to send a child who’s had a bad dream back to their own bed? It’s an ordeal, let me tell you,” she laughed, popping her back with a bend that didn’t quite look physically possible, “You get more sleep by just letting them climb into bed.”

A lifetime ago, that was a lesson learnt the hard way and the source of several sleepless nights. Now, Mama knew that it made Lila feel better to be surrounded like that. Maybe it helped keep away some of the darkness the woman carried locked up.

The trip back to camp was a quiet one, everyone half-expecting another gunshot at any moment. But it was uneventful, and they all had to untie the knots of anxiety as they handed the fish off to the women who’d been handling food preservation that day. Even Lila had to take a few deep breaths once she’d convinced Petal it was alright to go with the other children to get ready for dinner.

Sammy was waiting for her, and Lila saw that they were shaken, but trying their best to put up a brave face. She didn’t want to baby them, but at the same time she wanted them to know they were still allowed to be shaken, to be afraid. So she took their hand gently, and just squeezed. She leaned against them, taking advantage of the few inches they stood taller than her to rest her head on their shoulder. Sammy squeezed back, and let their head rest on hers, watching the kids play a little before dinner.

“Does it get easier?”

The question hung for a moment, before Lila shrugged.

“Some things do. Some ‘its’ aren’t meant to.”

She thought about saying more, but just let the quiet fill the space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Under The Waxing Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The hardest thing about leading a survivor group in the years-long apocalypse was how frequently and easily panic could take root in an otherwise relatively calm setting. Most of the survivors here were hardened by several winters and deep, profound losses but every so often, people who were still visibly raw would pass through, all nerves close to the surface and an inability to cope with something relatively minor in the grander scheme of things. There had been a trend of weary, exhausted women making their way to the group, nearly collapsing in relief when they were brought into the camp and then once they’d had a good, warm night in a tent and a decently full belly, killing themselves quietly. One even put stones in her pockets and walked into the river a la Virginia Woolf. Mama remembered brief flashes of passing through a near-empty suburban neighborhood with the original six and how quickly Ashleigh and Gina had run for a pretty house with a dark red door. She remembered how there had been nothing inside but devastation. She was glad she never saw her own house again._
> 
> We meet the men of group Antianeirai, and the council discusses the men found in the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since this is one of my lesser-read stories, I'll spare the laundry list on where I've been, just that you should follow me on tumblr at noccalula-writes.tumblr.com 
> 
> It's a hell of a lot easier to keep up with my inane ramblings that way. 
> 
> This story is going to continue, it has a clear cut end in mind around chapter 8-10. It may move slower than my others, but watch this space.

Miles squinted in the glaring sunlight, one hand coming up to shield his eyes as he peered across the rows of cabbage glistening wet. Chris was standing a few rows back, bent to force the hoe down into the earth to till up another one. The mere sight of Chris working in the field filled Miles with a sort of tandem disgust-anguish that he had yet to get over in the half-year he’d been here. Chris was a square shouldered, strong jawed he-man type who worked in the sun with his shirt off and generally looked like a cologne ad, only dirtier and more haggard around his kind eyes. A lot of the women at camp would work specifically on the days that Chris did and Miles had the sneaking suspicion it wasn’t just due to how well he seemed to know his way around planting and tending a garden. The younger man watched as Chris dug a dirty boot into a growing hole, rooting up piles of soil to widen the mouth of the bed with careful consideration.

Clearly, Chris had been a man who lifted weights before the dead began walking and the world went to hell. Miles? Not quite so much.

“Hey Miles,” Chris called casually without even glancing up, focusing on finishing his row, “What can I do for you?”

Miles made that ugly face he made when the sun was in his eyes and moved closer, holding up a piece of all-too-rare paper from a dirty composition notebook.

“Just getting notes for the council tonight, helping Amira get an agenda together. You got anything you wanna bring up?"

Chris paused to lean on his hoe, digging out a dirty rag to wipe his face. Even in all the dirt and the ever-deepening wrinkles of existential anguish, his eyes were so blue they were almost startling. From the moment Miles had arrived, scared and unsure and braced for the worst, he had been nothing but patient and compassionate with him. As Miles had transitioned from prisoner to guarded ward to actual functional member of the group, Chris had been there to keep him in line and help him learn the ropes. The difference between Miles and many other men was that he had taken the lemons handed to him and painted them gold.

“Not unless Delta wasn’t planning on explaining how they’re gonna get rid of the caterpillars eating the tomatoes,” Chris shrugged, shifting his weight with an almost-laugh, “Or who the hell those men were in the woods.”

Miles’ mouth grew tight. Transparency was particularly important to the Antianeirai camp, but it didn’t make it easier when unease moved through the ranks after an incident like the one in the woods.

“Yeah, who fuckin’ knows who those guys were,” Miles muttered but was quick to change the subject, “So no pressing points from the XY-sect of the camp?”

“Not a damn thing that I’m aware of,” Chris responded blithely, picking up his hoe again.

Miles watched his muscles ripple under the sun-browned skin of his back and frowned. He frowned the entire way back to the main camp – the big circle of tents, lean-to’s, the odd RV or beat-up airstream dragged from whatever distance all arced on either side of the half-burnt house, the barn. The fire pit in the middle was laden with small tables, extra spits, and iron pots, the center point of this wagon formation where everyone gathered at night to eat and socialize and share. Miles had been more of an Ayn Rand sort of guy before it all went to hell but he had to admit, the sort-of socialism he had seen in the group was working and working well. One group fished, another hunted the surrounding woods, even more tended the gardens and planted the cornfields and crops and the workload was split between every able-bodied person present. Nobody went hungry unless everyone was going hungry, and that hadn’t happened in the time he’d been there.

Miles had to admit that what he’d envisioned when Mama had bent into his face in all her domineering malice to lay down the hard and fast rules was very, very different. A society run entirely by women conjured up visions of the ladies lounging indoors, eating pilfered bonbons and laughing while an army of shirtless men in chains tended to their every whim. The idea had made him sick but not quite as sick as watching the little mangy-looking blonde one put an axe in the skull of the man to his right when he announced proudly that he’d “bow to no bitch”. The only words that left Miles’ mouth afterwards were “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am”, no matter how much his ego stung.

Pride comes before the fall, after all.

Now, he was the official mouthpiece for the male or male-identifying members of the group, the sole man on the council elected by his peers for his eloquence. What a difference six months had made.

“Hey Miles,” Sam greeted in passing like they were in the hallways of a high school or something equally as innocuous.

From what Miles could tell Sam would be smack in the middle of high school right now if things hadn’t gone horribly wrong, probably being mocked relentlessly or otherwise ignored. The brief memory – rows of lockers, the smell of the gymnasium, graduation, laughter and drama and boredom – ripped into something in his guts and he dropped it immediately, the burning heat of nostalgia too much to endure in the current circumstances.

High school had been easy for Miles. He wasn’t classically handsome but he was still considered attractive, never at a loss for a girlfriend or a date, always invited to parties. Too casual, too cool. He looked at Sam and thought “theater kid” or “anime club.”

In the distance, the slim figure of Yesenia headed towards the far end of the field where the goats were kept. Farm life was noisy – animals were likely to draw predators from the woods, so they were spread across various areas to keep walkers from cloistering together toward the sounds. The peripheral fence was patrolled all day, the outlying fences put into the woods checked three times a day, more if a trap was set off. He slowed his pace to watch her, her long black hair pulled back, the tightness of her dirty jeans across her hips and thighs. God knows, it had been a very, very long time since Miles had touched anyone sexually, even longer since he had been able to openly flirt with a girl but if the opportunity ever struck, he would definitely be flirting with Yesenia, the retail-worker-turned-goat-herder.

That was of course a very big ‘if’. ‘Fraternizing’ was never frowned upon but this wasn’t college – the rules of what constituted harassment were much stricter here (prohibitively so, he had tried to complain, like he had to walk on eggshells around women all the time – a statement that was met with laughter) and the punishments were harsh. Touching someone against their will? Sure, punish away, but what about the guys who are just trying to get a signal either way? Miles didn’t get it. It all just seemed so stupidly arbitrary but hey, whatever. He had accepted that staying here meant following the rules regardless of whether he liked them or not.

Stopping by the rain barrel for quick drink, Miles mulled his to-do list for the day. Although he represented the male group members to the council, the small handful of them looked to Chris for moral guidance far more than they looked at him. They trusted his presentation, relied on his ability to articulate well but at the end of the day the fact stood: they didn’t like him. He wasn’t sure if it really bothered him – being unliked wasn’t new – but it certainly didn’t make him happy.

He was still contemplating that thought with his hands on the edges of the barrel in a white-knuckle grip when something smacked his shoulder, sending him a good foot off the ground.

“Whoa there.”

Mama watched him warily as he tried to regain his cool, unable to fight her growing smirk. The hypervigilance was real for everyone there but there were still times when they might relax at least a little, surrounded by members of their group and behind several fences. Hell, Mama had said there was a place where they put up walls near Alexandria.

“Sorry, shit,” Miles hissed almost to himself, taking out his own sweat rag to wipe his hands if only to look busy.

Even without looking he could feel Mama’s dark eyes settled on him, that quiet assessment she was so known for. Whatever feelings he might have had about being prostrate when he showed up, he had to admit he had known very few people who carried themselves with the composure of a leader the way Mama did. Furthermore, it had been proved to him over and over that she was the most capable, reasonable person to be commanding any group that he’d come across.

Beat the hell out of the paramilitary types – the infighting, the egos, the climbing. His place here had far more benefits than his place there ever did.

“You got what you need for tonight?”

Miles nodded, shifting his weight. He wasn’t a small guy, almost as tall as Chris only without the big broad shoulders, and Mama met him partway up, neither tall nor short. Her presence was big, though. He wondered often what she must have been doing before all of this.

“Yeah, nothing pertinent from us,” he said, aiming for casual as his heart finally stopped racing, “Just garden concerns and questions about the dudes in the woods.”

Raising her eyebrows, Mama patted his shoulder one more time as she moved to pass him, heading toward the barn, “Oh, _everybody’_ s got questions about them, rest assured we’ll be talking about it."

Miles turned to watch her walk away, hesitating only a moment as he stuffed his rag back into his pocket, “Hey, uh, Mama?”

She stopped, turning to look back in quiet response.

He chewed his lip for a long moment as he found the words he was looking for, a struggle to align them properly as not to seem disrespectful. Disrespect of any authority was a bad idea nowadays but here? Miles already felt that he was treading on the mercies of women who probably hated him anyway, even though they were rarely pointed toward him anymore.

“Are we sure it’s the best idea to tell everyone about that kind of shit when it happens?” he began, taking a few steps forward but stopping as she turned around to face him fully and hear out his concern, “I know you like to be transparent here, but there’s a lot of us now and it might just make unnecessary fear.”

Mama considered this point with a slow, singular nod, taking a few steps to close the distance a little more. Transparency or no, this was not a conversation the public needed to get involved in. Resting her hands on her jutting hips, Mama sighed

“Miles? You’re a smart guy. That’s why you’re doing so well here.”

Loaded implication, that statement.

“So you of all people should know by now,” Mama began to walk backwards toward the barn, signaling that this would be the last said on the subject, “That there is no such thing as unnecessary fear anymore.”

 

***

 

_Mama – Lydia – had one hand locked around Gina’s as the blood came spilling out of her shoulder, the torn wound spitting out dark crimson like a fountain. Ashleigh was sobbing hoarsely as both of them used their free hands to press the t-shirt down into the injury. Mama can’t remember if she was crying then or not, only that a knot in her throat burned with the realization that Gina was going to die. Behind them, Shim’sani prayed quietly as Chantelle triple-checked the barricaded door they had so narrowly escaped into, the maddening moans now smothered by a few feet of cement and metal._

_“Lydia!” Ashleigh cried out, her voice jagged with grief that hadn’t even begun to approach full bloom, only getting started, “Lydia we have to do something!”_

_Gina’s wide hazel eyes were fixed on her sister and her friend – her rescuer, her compatriot – as they worked above her, trying desperately to staunch the bleeding on a bite that would be bringing lethal infection even if the blood loss didn’t take her first. Her heart beat a hummingbird’s staccato in her chest, the adrenaline surge of a dying animal making her hands go numb and cold though she could still feel the weight of someone holding each of them._

_Lila’s boots came scuffing quickly back down from the hall ahead, wads of cloth in her hands and a wild look in her eyes as she dove back down beside them and began to work her fingers into the slick, bloody mess._

_“Let go,” Lila commanded with more authority than anyone had seen the relative newcomer use, “Let go and let me change the cloth, these are soaked!”_

_There was a wet, squelching scramble of dark red, glossy cotton and a new, faded towel shoved into the open spot, all of their hands too bloody to keep a good grip on anything besides the raggedy cotton._

_Gina’s face had gone ghastly white, her lips moving fruitlessly as she wheezed in a breath. Slowly her eyes moved to her sister’s face. Ashleigh. They had escaped their captors – their abusers, their rapists – when a skinny brown lady showed up with a gun and a plan. In the time that came after, she watched Ashleigh go from a shy B-student with wallflower tendencies to someone who was mercilessly capable; her little sister had become the heroine she’d always liked to read about. The scars, the dirt, the haggard lines on her face may have been ugly reminders of reality for Ashleigh herself, but Gina looked at them and saw the hard-earned survival that they had both fought and bled for. That she herself was now bleeding for, bleeding rivers onto cold concrete in this shitty warehouse she’d probably driven past the last time she was in Columbia._

_Her slender, worn hand slipped from her sister’s and went shakily towards her cheek, Ashleigh’s eyes widening at the bloody digits near her face._

_“G?” she asked, just this side of frantic, “Gina?”_

_Shim’sani’s prayers turned to soft sobbing as the room became quiet, Lydia and Lila’s grunts of effort subsiding as they all watched Gina reach out for Ashleigh. The younger sister’s face wrinkled in sadness when Gina’s fingers smudged red lines affectionately across the pale flesh, an uncoordinated attempt at comfort destroyed by spilled blood._

_Ashleigh choked back a sob when Gina extended her other hand towards Lydia, patting at her hip in uncoordinated, short bursts. Lydia looked down, mouth tightening into a line when she realized what Gina was reaching for._

_Her gun._

 

***

 

Amira always sat to the far right of the seats that the trio used during Council Meetings, a broken board in her lap to press on as she jotted down real-time notes onto yellowing sheets of loose-leaf paper they’d found in a distant warehouse some time ago. Watching community brewing and democracy happening had always given Amira the warm-fuzzies, all the way back to when she was a little girl watching her mother and her friends put together mailers for the local elections. Immigrants, Amira found, always took the duty of citizenry very, very seriously. A woman from Liberia had moved in next door to her family when she was a child and she bonded quickly with Amira’s mother, the two of them often attending city hall meetings and holding integration groups at the local library. Her parents took their children with them to vote. This might not have been the same thing – and how that made her heartsick, the idea of never checking another ballot box again, the idea that brawn was still winning out over the greater good and in newer and more fantastically deadly ways – but it was a similar principle, and the meetings always filled her with some vague sense of purpose.

The fire that crackled in the center flickered warm light over the worn, dirty faces of the gathered survivors, most of whom took these duties very seriously. Tabitha, a short, chubby young woman smattered with freckles and braces that would eventually have to be broken and pried off with pliers, had been working on her family’s ranch when the infected finally reached them. She’d been able to escape with three horses when Mama and the group found her, the last living member of her seven-person family, and her experience in training and raising them had been invaluable. For these meetings, however, she took the youngest children with her to the makeshift stables to keep them out from underfoot. Blessedly, there were no infants anymore.

Mama, hair slicked with creek water from her swim and tucked behind her ears, paced idly around the campfire. It was tradition that led them to hold these council meetings the same way, at the same time – always just after dusk with a fire burning, every new moon. Visibility would be lower and make them less viable targets if someone slipped past those who kept secure watch, and the brightness of the full moon was too good an opportunity to hunt in the forest to waste. The summer nights were still balmy and warm well after the sun was gone and the fire was unnecessary, but tradition meant a lot now in the land of no law, and someone lit one every single time. It was never Mama.

The male members of the camp – a whole whopping nine of them – interspersed across the group. The remaining two, including Mule, were in the woods as lookout but the majority of them were present for any democratic goings-on. Men who were new to the camp were kept separate and captive until they either proved they were in fact just passing through and departed peacefully or weathered the initial trial period to make sure they were going to play ball with the rules as they were. Any man still present was because he had been willing to accept matriarchal rule without question, though a voice was still granted through Miles. Surprisingly, this had worked out fairly well – no defectors, no attempts at violent overthrow and no sexual or domestic violence in quite some time.

Miles tapped his ratty, rolled-up sheet of paper in his hand and watched Mama pace, eyes occasionally darting to Yesenia as she sat beside Lila, chatting companionably. The older woman kept a soft gaze and a friendly demeanor until those moments came every so often that she gazed out at nothing, sometimes for hours at a time, as some malaise seized her. Those periods were much more common than anyone but Mama and Delta might have known as Lila was expert at hiding them, gifted with the plastering on of a smile and a calm presence for the children that looked to her. So many of them no longer had any mothers. So many mothers no longer had any children.

“Alright, guys,” Amira piped up, lifting her head to look out around the assembly, “We’re calling to order the last meeting of the month, August twenty ninth…maybe... under a waxing moon.”

The time of year was never more than approximate but Amira had been keeping closer track than anyone else.

“First order,” Mama began, turning on a heel to address the gathered camp as she pushed the tips of her fingers together habitually, a public speaking tic, “We’ve got the damn tobacco worms again.”

The grumbling confirmed that this was in fact a big point of contention, though more were probably hoping she’d open with the briefing about the men in the woods. Such was Mama – building up to big things.

“We’re going to do the same thing we did last time, which is break out the cayenne and dish soap and spritz the leaves. If we wait for wasps, we’re gonna lose all the plants, which brings me to: Chris? You got any field updates?”

Chris sat up straighter and glanced around before clearing his throat, “Yeah, the last of the tomatoes are duking it out with the caterpillars but the cabbage is coming in great. Petal and the girls found a new blackberry bramble south of the mill so we’re gonna pick ‘em and then haul more of the vines over, and ours on the west fence are looking good but we gotta watch for the birds. Watermelon’s good, herb garden’s good, green beans are good, cucumbers are good.”

“Soil still looks good, then?”

“So far,” Chris nodded, “I mean, there’s some things we can plant to replenish what gets taken out but I’m not sure what they are. In the meantime we’ve got horse manure and egg shells.”

“Gotta love that horse shit,” Delta quipped from her seated spot on a stump, pulling a couple of laughs.

Mama smirked over at the mop of spite and hair and smirked, remembering a time when Delta spoke three words maximum and never to anyone but her.

“Hunting’s good,” she continued, cracking her knuckles, “It’s better in the summer and spring, we know that, so we’ve got to remember when it drops in the autumn not to worry. Our rabbits are doing what rabbits do, so we’ll have them and cabbage to fall back on no matter what.”

Miles nodded, shifting from foot to foot off to the side. He used to be excellent at giving presentations and by all accounts he still was, only now he was besotted by a nervousness he used to never experience. One day far in the future, Miles would get his hands on a college textbook about trauma and recovery and some of his behavioral changes would make much, much more sense – now, all he could do was shift his weight impatiently. The movement brought Mama’s eyes back over to him and she raised her eyebrows, nodding him over.

“Miles, do the menfolk need the floor for anything?”

Miles cleared his throat and referenced his shoddy list one more time before stepping closer to the fire and thusly the center, mindful of the body language signal he could be sending by trying to stand front and center. He was always aware of these things nowadays, little ticks that could have otherwise gone unnoticed but now it was always at the forefront of his mind. Exhausting

“Uh, well, Chris has already given the farming details,” he folded the paper haphazardly and shoved it into his back pocket, clapping his hands together for the sake of having something to do with them, “Well, I guess that leaves the walker report. We’ve had sixteen since the last meeting, which is an uptick for us but not that scary since one of them was a larger cluster, so it’s not like sixteen just wandered by on their own.”

He scanned the crowd briefly – old trick, keep eye contact, keep emphasis – and raised his hand. “But guys, I gotta admit, that kind of freaks me out. We’ve been out here on our own for a long time, it’s a lot of stragglers now but they seem to be clumping together a little more now so while they’re coming fewer and further between, they’re coming in bigger groups.”

“Superherds,” called out Luz the resident seamstress, able to stitch anything and anyone back together, as she raised one of her time-worn hands, “When Jamia’s group passed through, they talk about superherds coming in from the cities.”

“Superherds,” Miles repeated, trying to minimize the bone-deep fear that the term struck into him to minimize any fear on behalf of the group, “I mean… maybe that’s a concern if we were closer to a major city but there’s so many natural borders out here, rivers and shit, suburban neighborhoods.”

“Don’t underestimate a crowd pushing their way over and through things,” cautioned Tabby, “I went to Warped Tour one year and the crowd actually brought the stage down just by pushing too far, too hard.”

Lila cut her eyes over at Tabby, who didn’t expand on that thought, “Don’t let this idea become a paranoia, we’ve been discussing the possibility for months. We’re working on a contingency plan.”

“That’s not going to help us if a herd rolls in, like, three days from now,” offered one of the others, voice colored with annoyance and fear.

Amira begrudgingly dropped her pen and raised her hands, rising to quiet the growing discourse, “Everyone settle down, you’ll get a chance to speak if you can just be patient.”

Mama put out her hands and effectively culled the growing din before it could rise too loudly, voice strong but reassuring, unaccusing.

“Y’all, listen. Fear and panic are the enemy of survival. We know this already from our own experiences that led us here. We get intel from those who pass through, and it’s going to be different from place to place, but Miles is right – we’re in an area with a lot of natural barriers.”

Relieved, Miles nodded back at her. He’d half expected to be blamed for the sudden alarm, though he couldn’t rightly point to anything that would support that fear.

“A superherd isn’t likely to pass through here,” she continued, one eye cast on Miles but otherwise perfectly confident, “At least not without some major warning signs. The only times we see big migrations of birds or wildlife anymore is when a dozen of them are coming through – imagine what that’d look like for a hundred. We’re working on a plan, we’ll let you know as soon as it’s formulated and as always, if you have any ideas or suggestions, come find one of us and tell us. We’re all ears.”

This seemed to placate most of the noise – as usual – and the group quieted down, all speaking quietly amongst themselves. This was Mama’s gift: confident leadership and an ability to get people on board, even when she wasn’t one hundred percent certain where they were going. The superherd concern had arisen a few times at this point but up until now, she didn’t realize how much it was at the forefront of the survivor camps’ minds. A glance at Delta and Lila and their respectively dark expressions told her that sooner rather than later was going to be a good time for this planning. Still, this gave her the opening to smoothly move the discussion along.

The hardest thing about leading a survivor group in the years-long apocalypse was how frequently and easily panic could take root in an otherwise relatively calm setting. Most of the survivors here were hardened by several winters and deep, profound losses but every so often, people who were still visibly raw would pass through, all nerves close to the surface and an inability to cope with something relatively minor in the grander scheme of things. There had been a trend of weary, exhausted women making their way to the group, nearly collapsing in relief when they were brought into the camp and then once they’d had a good, warm night in a tent and a decently full belly, killing themselves quietly. One even put stones in her pockets and walked into the river a la Virginia Woolf. Mama remembered brief flashes of passing through a near-empty suburban neighborhood with the original six and how quickly Ashleigh and Gina had run for a pretty house with a dark red door. She remembered how there had been nothing inside but devastation. She was glad she never saw her own house again.

Miles looked to his collective hutch of other men – Chris, Mule, Jason, Gavin, Bill and Ted (those were most definitely not their names but whatever, ‘Mule’ wasn’t anybody’s actual name either) – who stared back at him with quiet interest, though nobody moved to raise a new motion. Miles looked back to Mama, envious of how smoothly she’d rolled out of that potential snag and watching how she kept her face so placid, her movements so calm and self-assured, and nodded in concession.

“Nothing beyond the walker report, then. Thanks for having us, as usual.”

A small smattering of chuckles. Even Delta, actually.

Knowing it was time to broach the big kicker they’d all been waiting for (and remarkably surprised that no one had jumped the gun and brought it up yet), Mama but her hands on her hips and glanced around, tone sobering somewhat.

“Okay, I appreciate everybody holding questions until the end since we’ve got the big elephant in the field tonight, and that’s the men we found in the woods.” Mama began a slow pace across the front line, having rehearsed this in her head a few times and hoping it would be sufficient for the time being as honesty was usually the best policy in these situations. “I want you all to understand that we don’t have as much information as we’d have liked from this last little visit, but I can confirm a couple of rumors for all of you. One, they were scouting.”

The resounding murmurs of worry picked up again until Mama raised a second finger.

“And two, it seemed as though they were aware a camp was out here.”

“Jesus, this is why we need to close borders,” called out Luz in frustration, gesturing out into the open forest, “We cannot let people go on and tell others where we are! Even with good intentions, they could get us all killed!”

“We can’t close borders,” Sam finally spoke, their voice cracking under the weight of anxiety for speaking out but they continued nonetheless, “We can’t. That’s how people get killed, when they don’t get help.”

“We can’t help everyone, we have to protect our _own_ and-“

“But we became ‘our own’ when we let people in!”

“Guys…” Amira tried to interject, glancing around as the conversation continued over her until she cut a desperate glance at Mama.

“Enough,” Mama barely raised her voice above her usual tone but took a few steps until she was solidly between Luz’s scowl and Sam’s frustratedly knit brow. “This is a conversation we will explore further in the future but for the time being, we’re not seeing any survivors passing through with any great regularity anymore, and we need to focus more on figuring out who’s looking for us and from where.”

Though the tension was rife, everyone was looking to her in silence. The camp wasn’t utopia – there had certainly been disagreements of this nature, including ones that resulted in the departure of camp members – but it worked. Open forum boded much better for maintaining that than keeping secrets ever had, and Mama had no intention of lying to them now.

Elbows rested back on the log behind her, Delta spit into the dirt and shrugged, “’Is ain’t the first time some som’bitch decided he was gonna take a farm by force, prolly won’t even be close to the last. Ain’t nothing to get panties twisted over, just keep your guns you and keep your eyes open.”

Lila cast a glance over at Delta. The thought of a warring conflict with another group of survivors made her feel sick, but she understood that defense of the camp was not debatable. How Delta was so casual about the idea, she had no clue.

“Exactly,” Mama continued, “We’re under very real threat every single day, this isn’t going to be different. We all knew this was a possibility, and we’ve been threatened for our resources before.”

“So then what are we going to do about it?” Miles asked and immediately regretted as it drew a few seconds of silent stares from various women, “…I mean, us in general.”

“We’re going to be splitting into small groups to scout for local sites, any signs of camps. Groups of two, no more than three, only one gone at a time so defenses aren’t down in case they show up again. The good news is we caught them a half mile outside of the perimeter, they still don’t have an exact location for what they’re looking for.”

Miles nodded, copper tang in his mouth as he realized he’d been biting down. It was good advice. He just couldn’t get over not being the one giving it, and that reminded him of exactly where his place here was.

Mama took an assessment glance around to get a temperature gauge. People clearly weren’t happy but that was to be expected given the situation, but as long as they weren’t at each other’s throats the rest could be worked with. Clearly the issue would need to be visited again, but for the time being at least everyone was on their feet and alert.

“We will update everyone with information as we receive it, but if we have nothing else,” Mama turned to look at Lila, who always held this particular honor, “Summary of meeting?”

Nodding, Lila stood and wiped the sweat from her palms onto her jeans before clearing her throat. Public speaking had never been her forte but she found this was getting much easier with time, or maybe the constant threat of murder via the undead had made everything else seem unimportant by comparison. Tonight still held its tension close to the vest though, and she found herself having to struggle to project her usual air of placidity.

“So, we’re going to keep on with our usual plan for the caterpillars, keep an eye on the skies for any signs of group herds, and keep each other updated about the strangers in the woods,” Lila laced her fingers in front of her, glancing around, “Everybody good?”

The grumbling and sighing series of replies told them everything else they needed, and when Amira adjourned the meeting the trifecta quickly moved together to assess the damage.

“Luz needs to learn to shut her damn mouth,” Delta offered flatly, “Ain’t nobody gonna be happy ‘bout feedin’ new mouths but supposin’ we find more people that ain’t suspect, I don’t see how runnin’ ‘em off helps us none.”

“It doesn’t,” Lila agreed, crossing her arms with a sigh, “If anything that’s how we get people scouting for us, we turn some poor family away and they get a grudge against us.”

“I don’t know how much time anyone has for grudges anymore,” Mama shook her head, casting her eyes out to the woods as though they held all the answers, “For now, we just gotta figure out where the fuck these assholes are.”

“And then?” Lila asked, already knowing the answer that was coming.

“We make a pre-emptive strike.”


End file.
